The importance of marginal gains in content creation.

How tiny quality adjustments really helped, the perils of content creation, and a juicy 50,000 milestone 🥹

The perils of content creation

In terms of content creation, last week was one of the best and one of the worst in equal measure!

I had well performing videos pushing the channel towards that great 50K milestone, we had another great podcast episode in the works, and things were pretty sweet with my plans for the week.

But on Friday morning, when I had planned to record the final bits for my weekend video (Fold 4 vs S23 Ultra) things started to go really badly.

My 9-5 job has been crazy busy with me working till late, most week days!

And my landlord is doing some building work to replace the roof in the studio and the noise sometime is just ridiculous. In short, I ended up having to take a break and go for a walk outside and use that time creatively.

So I recorded some b-roll instead and waited for the noise to go away. By the time they were done at around 4PM I had little time to record, edit and again, ended up finishing the video at the early hours of Saturday at 3AM.

Happy with the result, but it was certainly a rollercoaster of emotions, as you can see in the bloopers in that video and also in the newsletter video below.

Always improving - tiny gains will eventually add up 💪🏼

If' I’ve learned anything in the last 2 and a half years is that we should always seek to improve in every video. This is easier said than done, of course but if you are interested,these are the latest additions to my content creation arsenal.

This is nothing new and we can see this in Sports and motor racing for example. A tiny % improvement (marginal gain) in any area will contribute to the overall performance.

In my case, these improvements by themselves don’t make videos perform well, but I 100% believe that these little touches will help make people watch my videos for longer, and make my content that “tiny little bit” more enjoyable. I could be wrong, but there’s no harm in trying.

My recent changes:

• Lens distortions - A service for Sound FX and music that I think brings somethign a bit more unique, especially in the last 2-3 intros that I did. And my favourite, the 8K video I did, entirely recorded on the S23 Ultra.

• Motion VFX plugins - I’ve been using MotionVFX for over a year now, since moving to Final Cut Pro (away from Premiere Pro) and the graphics, texts, animations you see in my videos are probably over 90% done using their plug-ins.
  

• Watching filmmaking content - I don’t pretend to be a pro in this space at all but I love learning how the real pros do it. I’ve been watching a lot of content about cameras, lenses, different techniques in lighting, all in a hope that some of that knowledge spills into the content I make.

• Training - I recently purchased some editing training material too. Again - nothing out of the ordinary, but there’s always something that the pros do that I sometimes think can be applied to my videos.

• What next? I think I will be upgrading my camera this year, or at the very least adding another angle. I am thinking it will likely be another Sony camera (I use the Sony A7Siii right now which I love), but not sure whether to get one of the newer models or even a cinema line one for extra juiceness in those b-roll shots 😎

Have a great day and “see you” next week!